


Animal Magnetism

by BeneficialAddiction



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Schitt's Creek
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Daemons, David Rose Deserves Nice Things, M/M, Rose Apothecary (Schitt's Creek)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-26
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:40:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27718994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeneficialAddiction/pseuds/BeneficialAddiction
Summary: Fins, Feathers, and Fluff of more than one kind; A Schitt's Creek re-telling with a bunch of soul-animals along for the ride!
Relationships: Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Comments: 12
Kudos: 33





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Are Daemon AU's still a thing? Is that still being done? Well it is now!
> 
> If you've never read (or watched) anything associated with His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass series), all you need to know to enjoy this fic is that every person has an animal "companion" that is essentially a representation of their soul.

Much like David, Versace has always been... well, _aloof._ She’s suspicious and particular, and anyone who knows David even a little bit isn’t surprised by this. Before she’d settled, she’d cycled through multiple forms the way David had cycled through designers – a martin one moment, a badger the next, and for one horrifying week some sort of winged avian like his parents’ that David had never bothered to learn the specifics of. His thirteenth birthday comes without a card or a call except from Adelina, who bakes him his favorite chocolate cake, and when her panther daemon Santi – _nurturing, gentle, protective_ – curls around him and licks at his elbow with a rough, warm tongue, Sace leaps from his side onto the shelf above his bed and slowly stretches into the sleek little black cat she settles as. 

It makes sense. Daemons take after their people after all, and David too prefers to watch with haughty disdain as the world happens all around him. He loves Adelina more than anyone and the fact that Versace chooses a cat, a near perfect replica of Santi, warms him down to his core. Smaller, obviously, and with four tiny white socks and a little white bib, she fits his aesthetic as well as his personality, and he feels... safer once she settles. All his hours spent alone in the near-empty halls of the Rose family estate feel less daunting with her draped elegantly across his shoulders. 

He’s glad she’s not all black. Everyone looks at black cats and calls them bad luck; but as with many other things, David may walk right up to toe that line but he never fully crosses it. His chill disinterest in others is protective armor, just like the carefully curated clothes he wears, and his mask of superiority is just that – a mask. Deep down, when his trust has been earned, he longs for connection, for closeness and comfort even when it seems like his very nature rebels against it, and Versace is no different. She loves to curl up in his lap on rainy afternoons, to sleep on his chest at night purring like a train, and when he starts to spiral and even her minimal weight becomes too much, she still reaches out with one velvet paw to keep the contact between them. 

That’s David though. 

She’s a part of him, the very representation of his soul. 

Anyone else she merely tolerates. 

Oh ok, yes, once in a great while Alexis’ pale blonde Red Fox Finnegan can cajole her into a very brief game of chase – if they're even in the country – but outside of that? 

She may be small but her claws are sharp, and besides, who do you think taught David to hiss with such venom in the first place? 

Things change when they move to Schitt’s Creek. 

Well, _move_ is charitable – when they’re _exiled_ to Schitt’s Creek. 

As soon as they step off the coach and start to unload their luggage onto the unkempt lawn in front of a decrepit motel, as soon as an unkempt man comes wandering up and introduces himself as the mayor, David knows they’re in for hell. 

Roland Schitt is followed by a domestic ram, dingy yellow-grey in color with black markings on its knees and face, large, curling horns denoting it male where daemons are almost always the opposite sex of their person. It chews placidly on a large wad of something gross, smells awful, and looks at them with dull eyes that are somehow still sharp and sly, their rectangular pupils putting a shiver down David’s spine. _Authority, stubbornness, not the most intelligent_ – and god, he named it _Mayor_ \- and it just stands there watching them like they all deserve to be there, like it’s laughing silently to itself while Roland laughs out loud. 

David feels sick. 

For two whole days the entire family locks itself in their rooms, not emerging for food nor sunlight. His mother’s red-tailed black cockatoo, Sir Albrecht Barrington, takes up a constant head-bob, the feathers on his head rising and falling in time as it quibbles to itself under its breath, and his father’s barn owl Isla begins to molt, choking up pellets all over the ratty carpet. Finnegan starts chasing his tail and chewing at his toes again, no matter how much David tries to comfort him or Alexis, and Versace disappears under the bed and doesn’t come out. 

It’s absolutely horrible. 

Then he meets Stevie when he finally emerges in a quest for clean towels, and she throws him off balance so much that for all of a minute, he actually thinks she doesn’t _have_ a daemon. 

When a tiny black nose pokes out of the pocket of her flannel, Versace rumbles and kneads at his shoulder, pricking his sweater with her claws, something she hasn’t done in years. 

Wayne – named after Bruce Wayne, and John Wayne, and Wayne Brixton, the only one of her mother’s boyfriends that she had ever liked – immediately scoffs at Sace before rolling up into a spiney little ball of quills and tucking himself back into Stevie’s pocket, unbothered and uninterested. A common Salt-and-Pepper hedgehog, he’s not much to notice at first – a lot like Stevie – opportunistic and prickly, _but,_ as David later learns, steadfast and loyal too. 

David often feels his beady little eyes following him over the next few weeks. 

It takes longer than that for them to become friends. 

_“I think you’re funny,”_ he says, and the next thing he knows he’s at some sort of god-awful hicktown country-bumpkin party surrounded by trucks and beer and more flannel than he’s ever seen in his life, and it... it’s ok. 

He survives it, and then he survives another week, and another, and suddenly he doesn’t hate every single thing around him anymore. 

It doesn’t hurt as much to get up and face his life, and he almost feels like he can breathe. 

Then one day he wakes up sure that he’s having a heart attack and Stevie drags him across town to an actual _vet_ who sees actual _pets_ in addition to peoples’ daemons – or at least, he assumes that’s how it works, since there’s a man in the waiting room with a ferret wrapped around each of his wrists and a woman sitting across from him with a cadre of cats piled into her lap that Versace watches with narrowed eyes and a fluffed-up tail. She’s been feeling out-of-sorts all morning, twitching away from David when he’d reached for her for comfort, spitting at Stevie and Wayne even though she hadn’t done that in a month, and now her claws are all out prickling through David’s Dries Van Noten where she’s perched herself on his shoulder. 

Before he can actually physically pass out in the waiting room, an enormous ball of golden fur comes trotting out with a huge doggy-grin on its face and marches right up to him, it’s tail wagging. 

“It’s your turn David,” she says politely, and oh she’s lovely, but he still startles because not a lot of daemons speak to him. 

Like, ever. 

He opens and closes his mouth a few times but the dog just turns and trots toward the doorway leading into the back, pausing to wait until Stevie pushes him to his feet and drags him along after. 

“Thank you Indi,” a small, muscly blonde man says as they step into the exam room, his blue scrub uniform as bright and cheery as the grin on his face. “David right? I’m Ted.” 

“Um, David, yes,” he agrees, his hand being pumped up and down far too eagerly. “Um, Indie? Like, a band?” 

“Oh, no, short for Indiana Bones,” Ted says with a chuckle, his face falling a little when David just stares. “You know, like Indiana _Jones...”_

“I don’t know what that means,” he says, and it comes out breathy and quiet and his head swims. 

“Ted, maybe David should sit down now,” Indi says kindly, and he finds himself nodding along stupidly as his knees give out. 

Stevie shoves at his shoulder as he goes down, guiding him onto a steel examination table. Sace lashes out at her, hissing and spitting like a bottle of shaken-up soda, but Stevie just narrows her eyes at her and doesn’t flinch. It’s all loud and chaotic and the room is too bright, and David’s heart is trying to burst its way out of his chest. Someone says _‘good job bud!’_ and strangely, he thinks it was both Ted _and_ Indi. 

Either that or he’s losing his hearing. 

Or his _mind..._

“Are you feeling anxious David?” Indi asks, sniffing around his ankles as her whole body wriggles. “You smell anxious.” 

Sace warbles a low, threatening yowl and the dog’s ears lay back against her head. Backing up three paces, she stills and dips down on her forelegs in a sort of formal bow. 

“Oh, I beg your pardon. Hello,” she apologizes, clearly trying to appease the daemon menacing her from David’s shoulder. 

Wayne sticks his head out of Stevie’s flannel pocket to observe the goings-on, sneering at the both of them before turning to Indi and nodding sedately. 

“Indiana,” he says coolly, like the grouchy old man that he is. 

“Hi Wayne!” Indi yips cheerfully, jumping back up to execute a skittery dance that has her nails clicking on the tile floor. 

Wayne grumbles and mutters under his breath, curling himself back into a tight, prickly ball and tucking away down into Stevie’s pocket again. 

Yup, David’s definitely losing his mind. 

A half-hour later he leaves the clinic with an entirely new view of himself and the understanding that anxiety and panic attacks are real things. It makes so much sense it hurts and yet somehow knowing that there’s a _reason_ he feels this way makes things a little better. Ted recommends trying some yoga which sounds ridiculous, except he also recommends meditation and journaling which David already does, so it might not be as crazy as it sounds. Indi tells him that the pretty waitress from the café - Twyla - and her hummingbird Jeffrey do a class on Wednesdays, and recommends that Sace try a dish of buttermilk from the Amish farm outside of town. Sace of course just shows her teeth, refusing to speak to any of them, and slinks beneath the bed when they finally get back to their room. 

For his part David collapses into the pillows and drags the blankets over his head, praying for sleep. 

Finnegan’s chirping chatter wakes him up later as he tries to wriggle beneath the bed to join Sace, Alexis bounding into the room and throwing open the curtains like all is right with the world. David hisses and hides from the light but Alexis drags the sheets off him, rolling her eyes when he tells her about the panic attack but quickly sobering when he explains. He tells her he’s thinking about maybe going to yoga and her eyes spark, her fingers poking at his shins in that way she does when she’s trying and failing to be casual. 

“Oh, at Mutt’s barn?” she says, her eyes everywhere but David. “Maybe I’ll go with you.” 

Oh. 

Right, he’d forgotten. 

She’s been doing community service cleaning up a highway or something with some bearded lumberjack-type, Finnegan gamboling through the trees in the meanwhile with the man’s racoon daemon. It’s not the worst guy she’s ever shown interest in – Stavros had had a stately English Foxhound, _imagine_ – but David is still vaguely frustrated that that’s her pressing concern. Finnegan seems to sense this and leaps onto the bed, snuffling around David’s ankles and doing the low-bellied wiggle he does when he’s... well, when _he’s_ anxious. 

It reminds him strangely of Indi and David can’t take the rollercoaster that is his brain anymore, so he flops back onto his pillows and tries to go back to sleep again. 

Life goes on. 

He starts exercising a little bit, doing squats on the lawn, and digs his leather-bound journal out of the bottom of his suitcase. He goes to yoga and gets paired with Jocelyn and her meerkat Gatsby when Alexis abandons him for Mutt, and he ends up falling asleep on top of her after he finally admits out loud that he’s lonely here in Schitt’s Creek. It opens something up in him, a willingness to _try,_ so he starts getting out around town a little more and spending time with Stevie. He watches as his sister and his parents start to... participate in things here in this little town and Sace finally, finally starts to act more like herself, prowling around the tops of cabinets and shelves as she observes and learns and judges. 

The day that she creeps up onto his chest while he’s reading and tucks her feet beneath her, closes her eyes and starts to purr, David breaks down and cries. 

Things get better. 

He starts to see Stevie as a friend, starts to engage with other people, starts to _do_ things. Sace starts to explore the motel and the grounds, straying outside of the three-yard distance she’d self-imposed from David since they’d arrived. He watches as his family settles, and settles, and settles, as Alexis meets the veterinarian and his mother sells make-up and his father speaks at a funeral. He’s invited on a ritual turkey-hunt, asked to counsel a student at the local high school, and sleeps with Stevie. 

He gets _attached._

It’s a stupid thing to do – he knows that. He’s avoided doing it for _years_ because it never ends well. As soon as he does something always goes wrong, and it’s no different now that they’re all here in Schitt’s Creek. 

His father finds a buyer, and they can leave. 

David goes to sleep that night dreaming of New York bagels and gallery openings with Sace kneading his feet, and yet in all his excitement he can’t imagine leaving Stevie behind. 

He’s not in love with her – he isn’t even sure he’s capable of that – but she’s important to him and he doesn’t want to leave her behind. 

So he asks, puts himself out there and asks her to come with him, and she says no. 

“We’re leaving,” Sace says once he manages to get himself away, back to his room where his suitcases are waiting, packed and ready to go. _“We_ are leaving.” 

So they leave. 

Bags in the back, keys in the ignition, Sace tucked in tight against David’s hip as he works the stick-shift in Roland’s ancient, battered pickup – they leave. 

Leave their family, leave their friend, leave Schitt’s Creek behind.


	2. A Catalogue of Daemons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **A catalogue of Daemons for your convenience.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't own any of these, they all came from Google!

**David Rose**

**_Versace:_** American shorthair, Black with white socks and a white chest. Aloof with strangers, particular, passionate and curious.

**Alexis Rose**

**_Finnegan:_** Red Fox, Light blonde in color with darker tipped ears and feet. Playful, clever, cunning and witty, good escape artists.

**Moira Rose**

**_Sir Albrecht Barrington:_** Red-Tailed Black Cockatoo, Dark grey to black with bright red tail feathers and a large crest. Dramatic, neurotic, and at times obsessive.

**Johnny Rose**

**_Isla:_** Barn Owl, Blonde and white, with russet-colored markings. Contemplative, dignified, intelligent and wise.

**Adelina**

**_Santi:_** Black Panther, Sleek and muscular but smaller than you’d expect. Nurturing, gentle, and protective, especially of their young.

**Stevie Budd**

**_Wayne:_** Hedgehog, Classic salt-and-pepper, white-bellied with black ears, nose, and shoulders, and quills that are white with black bands. Named after Bruce Wayne. Loyal, opportunistic, resourceful and steadfast.

**Ted Mullins**

**_Indiana Bones aka Indi:_** Golden Retriever, Gold/blonde and full-coated. Loyal, family-oriented, affectionate and trustworthy.

**Roland Schitt**

**_Mayor:_** Domestic Ram, White with black markings on its face and knees, shaggy-coated with curling horns. Same-sexed, because Roland is weird. Of authority, steadfast, stubborn and not the most intelligent.

**Jocelyn Schitt**

**_Gatsby:_** Meerkat, Beige with black markings and a dark face. Diligent, fierce when protecting, patient, resourceful, and social.

**Mutt Schitt**

**_Calamity Jane:_** Raccoon, Fat and fluffy, grey and white with dark markings, a ringed tail, and black face mask. Curious, inquisitive, resourceful.

**Twyla Sands**

**_Jeffrey:_** Humming bird, Quick and small, green with a white belly and red throat, iridescent. Magic, luck, spirituality, and beauty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More will be added as we add our characters!


End file.
